How To Increase E-Commerce Sales With 8 Small Changes

May 28 2018|5 min read

Trust Seals

Adding a single, or even a handful of trust seals such as ‘Money Back Guarantee’ (As Seen Below) or SSL Certificates can be helpful to convert first-time visitors that haven’t been aware of your brand long enough to have established trust. I recommend testing the location of your trust seals, i.e. try moving them right next to the ‘Add To Cart’ button to help boost that decision aka conversion.

Shipping Options

The ideology is that some of your visitors might be looking to get your product at the cheapest price possible and aren’t worried about how long it will take to arrive while some will be more worried about how fast you can get your product to them, by giving your users this option you’re far less likely to see abandon carts due to those objections. Obviously, there are far more reasons as to why a user might want multiple shipping options, but I’m sure you understand the value in providing these options for your visitors. (Shipping Methods Example Seen Below)

Anchor The Price

Everyone and their mom loves getting the best deal, even if they don’t care about the price too much. As with most conversion rate optimization tactics, it all comes down to simple psychology.

Market research on psychology tells us that when an individual sees a “suggested retail price” or “normal price” crossed out and the “current price” there, even if they know it’s bogus, they are still more likely to purchase that product. There’s just some level of psychological effect that the fear of missing out on the best deal has on people.

Customer Segmentation

Rather than throwing a blanket over all of your customers with your marketing efforts, consider adjusting your values and pitches based on who they are and how familiar they are with your brand. For example, you can offer a discount on all first-time orders and on the flip side, offer a discount for loyal returning customers. Both are clear incentives that will raise your conversions.

This can go deep all the way into your email and messenger marketing funnels or it can be as simple as a lightbox popup based on if they are a returning customer or not. If you have logins for your E-Commerce website then it’s far simpler to offer returning customer discounts, of course.

Just be sure not to go overboard with the discounts. Segmentation doesn’t only mean with your pitches. When you’re providing value, be sure to offer that value based on any data you have on that potential or existing customers.

Does that make sense? Let’s dive into an example…

Let’s say you have an E-Commerce store selling skincare products and on one of your blogs you have a lead magnet with “The Top 5 Tips For Improving Chest Acne”. After any users opt in for that, even if all they entered was an email, you still can use that data to segment the subscriber in the future. So for example, tailor your future emails and promotions for that individual to anything you have that is relative to Chest Acne, as that user has given you a blatant signal about what they need help with and what information they are interested in. It’s not worth your time or that subscribers time if you send them everything you curate under the sun related to skin care.

When in doubt – get as relative as possible. You might not have any stored data on that user, but you can analyze the source of which they originally came from and tailor your marketing efforts from there. This will not only increase your conversions, but it will also increase your click-through rates, open rates, etc.

Chat Assistance

According to a Forrester Research Study, 44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer.

Even as a marketer, you’re also a consumer – think back to the times you made an online purchase. Did you use the live chat assistance? If you did, then it worked. If you didn’t, do you believe it even somewhat subconsciously reinforced your trust in the brand?

There’s a lot of power in telling your customers that if they have any issues whatsoever they can contact you for a resolution.

But hey, we get it, for a smaller company it’s unrealistic to hire an agency or hire a whole team of staff for live chat assistance. That’s why we’re such heavy promoters of utilizing Messenger Chatbots. You can achieve nearly the same effect, but without any staff needed at all. Your customers can speak to the bot and resolve problems far faster than if they were even speaking to a person. If you’re familiar with Messenger Chatbots then I don’t need to convince you, you understand what I’m talking about. If you’re not familiar, learn more about chatbots here.

Comparison Charts For Similar Products

This is especially valuable if you’re promoting a handful of products, i.e. Amazon FBA. By comparing your own products you’re able to pin point the main product you want to be sold, or, on the flip side you can compare your main product to your competitions products and really emphasize why your product is better.

There’s no better way to say in a few seconds that your product is better than by simply having a chart that lays out the pros and cons that truly compare the products in a line-up. Which is better? No need to build trust here, just show them.

Niche Pursuits wrote an excellent article about how to build a comparison chart, especially for Amazon FBA businesses, check it out here.

Real Testimonials

There’s a reason Trip Advisor is so successful – people love reassurances from real humans who have experienced what they are going into. We commonly use video testimonials for our clients’ mid and bottom of funnel Facebook advertising campaigns, because, it simply builds trust and authority like no other.

Now you don’t need to have your clients’ or customers create some hyper-professional video for you to advertise. You can simply ask your customers who have spent a lot of money with you if they wouldn’t mind giving you a review that you can post on your website. Most people are more than willing to do this. See a testimonial (below) we received from Daryl Rosser the Founder of Lion Zeal, a high 6-figure SEO education agency.

Don’t be afraid to just screenshot reviews from your Facebook page or even comments and use those as testimonials on your website. They tend to work quite well because it’s a direct screenshot from another platform and there’s less room for fabrication, which means people will trust it’s a real testimonial.

Payment Options

Payment Options are a great way to not only reassure your visitor that your a trusted company, but also a way to remove any objections if the visitor wanted to use a specific payment method. (See example payment methods below)

Be sure you’re careful here. Don’t just copy and paste some photo from Google, make sure your payment processor actually offers all the payment options you’re presenting. If you have any presented that you don’t actually offer, you’re very likely to miss out on sales and piss your visitors off extremely quick.

However, you don’t need 52 payment options listed – just having the core ones will suffice for most niches, i.e. Visa, PayPal, Discover, MasterCard.

Disclaimer

If you’re new to conversion rate optimization, it’s absolutely vital to your business that you allow data to make all of your decisions. Every client we take on, whether it’s E-Commerce, Lead Generation, etc. we have a meticulous process we follow that ensures there is no guessing, no egotistical errors and ultimately no wrong moves made. This includes researching and understanding the market, tracking and analyzing actual website visitors and then performing legitimate split tests before ultimately allowing data to make the final decision.

The process of conversion rate optimization can be simple in ideology but for complete optimization and maximizing your websites potential, you must be analytical in your approach. If you need help with this, this is exactly what we specialize in – feel free to reach out and we will thoroughly audit your website and then discuss what potential there is.